Read more: Brexit is the left-wing choice
It’s getting towards the end now and both sides are going for the knockout. The Remain camp’s best shots are still fear and more fear, particularly Chancellor George Osborne’s warning of the economic chaos that would follow Brexit and President Barack Obama’s far more menacing threats, which go far deeper than the balance of trade. We may not want to believe the other big hitters who have tried the same argument—from the IMF to the OECD, Goldman Sachs to the Governor of the Bank of England—but the American president is the heavyweight champion. When he says “duck” usually you duck.
But are those the only shots they have? Where’s that strong single market economy they talk about? They can hardly mean the Eurozone. If the European Union is so good for the Britain, why isn’t it good for Spain, or France, or Italy? Key British sectors, not least finance, rail, and energy, depend on state support, high street chains have to be made to pay the living wage, and the much vaunted “new age” businesses are prominent only in London and a bit of Salford.
Osborne and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell talk about re-balancing the economy. EU membership certainly hasn’t worked in its favour. Over the past 25 years, UK manufacturing has declined faster than any other G7 country, down to 8 per cent of the workforce compared to Germany’s 30 per cent and France’s 22 per cent. British steel now represents less than 0.1 per cent of GDP. Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian has concluded that EU membership was irrelevant to steel’s recovery on every count except one: that it was hampering the rescue.
The issue of workers’ protection is only a feint. The EU didn’t invent workers’ rights. British workers were fighting for their rights when Europe was still a land of peasants. For the Labour party to claim that those rights depend on the EU is to deny its own history. We had the NHS before the EU. We had equal pay before the EU. If anything, EU free movement has put British workers’ rights in more jeopardy by cheapening labour costs and increasing agency work and zero-hour contracts.
Big countries and big markets count, but less so than good governments and the good markets they can create in the long run. There is no evidence that the EU has been good for British markets, and the upcoming TTIP treaty is so bad that EU commissioners are negotiating it in secret.
As for the Remain campaign’s argument that the EU has led to 70 years of peace in Europe, this is not so much a punch as a wild swing. The desire for peace promoted the EU, not the other way around. The architecture of post-war security—Bretton Woods (1944), United Nations (1945), Marshall Aid (1948), NATO (1949)—was in place before the Coal and Steel Community (1951) and long before the Treaty of Rome (1957). Whatever the brave men who landed on the Normandy beaches thought they were doing, they weren't doing it for the EU.
It is NATO and the balance of power that secured peace in Europe, not trade deals. In any case, trade deals aren’t always benign; EU promptings in the Ukraine encouraged a toxic little war that brought back talk of nuclear conflict in Europe for the first time in 30 years. And Schengen has collapsed for security reasons, leaving member states exposed on all sides. If Turkey is granted visa-free travel, the odds of staying safe will worsen. If the Foreign Office idea of a liberal international order finally trumps our national security and Turkey is allowed to join the EU, why not Egypt? Why not Israel? Why not any other Mediterranean country that the White House deems useful?
The Remain campaign also has a bewildering set of defensive postures known as “uncertainty.” These are not so much hits as holds, ways of dragging your opponent down by pointing to the risks of moving. There’s no sure way to answer this. The UK is currently a member of 91 international bodies ranging from the Asian Development Bank to the Zangger Committee and no one has a clue whether they promote more uncertainty or less.
There have been many other reports that you would expect to promote certainty but which have not been convincing in the slightest. The government’s 2014 audit of EU “Balance of Competences,” with 2,300 pieces of written evidence on why the EU needs “ambitious reform,” has played no part in the campaign. Nor has the Cabinet Office document on how long it would take to unravel the treaties, which has been ignored from the beginning. Cameron’s four painstakingly-won concessions have been quickly forgotten.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England has issued warnings on market panic (central banks are supposed to create stability). And the Treasury Report on the effects of Brexit on GDP—come on, can you imagine Osborne allowing his civil servants to say anything else? There have been Whitehall farce threats that everything will fall down once we stand up: jobs, incomes, pensions, house prices, share prices, hospital places, value of the pound, trousers—they’re all coming down, while taxes and roaming charges will go up, we’re told.
Uncertainty is the very point of neo-liberal economics. In a market economy, they say, no one can be sure of the long run and risk makes people perform better. One point, however, is clear. No independent forecaster is predicting an economic disaster on Brexit. The worst-case scenario (drops of up to 8 per cent of GDP over a period of years) is highly speculative, not catastrophic and in any case, we can’t be free of uncertainty. Nations, like individuals, must incur some risk. The question is: how much?
Here, the left can put in some telling blows. The harder the EU drives integration, the less democratic it becomes and the less democratic it becomes, the harder it must drive integration. The technicians of the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice and the European Commission all shield the EU from its citizens.
The last thing the ECB wants is the elected government of Greece getting in the way of what happens in Greece. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recalled that in his negotiations with the ECB, Greece was subjected to humiliation, authoritarianism, brute force, inertia and “demonization of the weak”—and so lost its politics, economy, assets, borders and sovereignty. It’s true that Varoufakis remains an EU supporter, but he has always had a Marxist taste for tortured dialectics. He once supported Margaret Thatcher as the fast track to socialism.
The EU is in a hole and Brussels won’t stop digging. Within two or three years, the EU will either revert to a collection of sovereign states with common interests, or it will plunge into federal union with one government, one economy, and one debt. And because democracy cannot unite Europe (there is no “European people” to ask) complete unification can only be left to the commissioners and the technicians, an awful, undemocratic and deeply uncertain scenario.
It’s not as if we haven’t been warned. In a 2004 New Statesman article, Robert Skidelsky argued that 20th-century democracy had led to 20th-century genocide. Far better, he reasoned, to have undemocratic cosmopolitan empires than democratic self-determining nation-states. He thought that the EU was heading in the right direction.
There was no national debate between the British government first seeking membership in 1962 and getting it in 1973. Pro-EU MPs from all parties colluded in getting the legislation through without the question of national self-determination being brought to the country. Tony Benn called it a coup d’etat. In the 1975 referendum, the same assortment of mainstream politicians, banks, big businesses, foreign governments, NGOs, broadsheets, establishment luvvies and the like supported the Remain campaign.
They won that time because they didn’t tell (or grasp) the truth about sovereignty—a truth made clear at Maastricht in 1992 when a European Community became a Union. Soon after, those same groups wanted Britain to join the Euro or the heavens would fall. They didn't fall and we were kept out of it by the political intransigence of Gordon Brown at No 11 and the intellectual intransigence of Derek Scott, Blair's economics advisor, at No 10.
But don’t forget that for the whole of its membership, the UK has only been able to win vital concessions by threatening to leave. If the Remain camp wins on 23rd June, we must face up to the fact the UK cannot cry wolf again. We will be obliged to follow the rest wherever they take us.
So now is the time. So far and with honourable exceptions like Gisela Stuart, Labour’s official “Remain” position has been almost unforgiveable. Faced with a pro-EU parliamentary party, it might be that Corbyn had no alternative. It might be that in his heart he hopes for a “Leave” because he knows an integrated industrial strategy is not permissible without it.
Even so, is it not incredible that Labour policy groups have to be reminded by their advisors that the British people value their country (known in the jargon as “the politics of attachment”)? Is it not incredible that Labour can relegate social democratic agency in favour of markets? Is it not incredible that Labour front benchers have not been honest on war or on immigration? Is it not incredible that many Labour MPs still do not see that immigration is not about the identity of others so much as the British people’s identity of themselves as a self-determining, free people who have been misled and patronised by their elites? Finally, is it not incredible that a Labour Prime Minister cannot say “British jobs for British workers” because—and much as the party would prefer to forget the man who said it—if it cannot say that, what can it say?
It’s true that the Leave campaign includes Tories on stilts. But so does the other side. And it’s an evil right-wing governments who gave us this chance to vote and debate. Hopefully, a Labour government in a British nation-state will have the nerve to do its stuff too—no more treaties or passing the buck—and we will have our politics back.
This is a crisis of succession of the sort that shapes our history. If we vote for Brussels or Strasbourg as our next political class, we are voting for oblivion if it all goes well, and chaos if it doesn’t. The left’s best shot is its core belief in social democracy as the shortest possible distance between the people and their representatives. If we vote for free movement of labour and capital across 28 nation-states we are voting for the dissolution of the pronoun “we”—the word on which the left’s hopes depend. Nothing in the Remain campaign touches this as a reason for being left and staying British. Time for the left to get up, stand up, and come to the mark.
It’s getting towards the end now and both sides are going for the knockout. The Remain camp’s best shots are still fear and more fear, particularly Chancellor George Osborne’s warning of the economic chaos that would follow Brexit and President Barack Obama’s far more menacing threats, which go far deeper than the balance of trade. We may not want to believe the other big hitters who have tried the same argument—from the IMF to the OECD, Goldman Sachs to the Governor of the Bank of England—but the American president is the heavyweight champion. When he says “duck” usually you duck.
But are those the only shots they have? Where’s that strong single market economy they talk about? They can hardly mean the Eurozone. If the European Union is so good for the Britain, why isn’t it good for Spain, or France, or Italy? Key British sectors, not least finance, rail, and energy, depend on state support, high street chains have to be made to pay the living wage, and the much vaunted “new age” businesses are prominent only in London and a bit of Salford.
Osborne and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell talk about re-balancing the economy. EU membership certainly hasn’t worked in its favour. Over the past 25 years, UK manufacturing has declined faster than any other G7 country, down to 8 per cent of the workforce compared to Germany’s 30 per cent and France’s 22 per cent. British steel now represents less than 0.1 per cent of GDP. Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian has concluded that EU membership was irrelevant to steel’s recovery on every count except one: that it was hampering the rescue.
The issue of workers’ protection is only a feint. The EU didn’t invent workers’ rights. British workers were fighting for their rights when Europe was still a land of peasants. For the Labour party to claim that those rights depend on the EU is to deny its own history. We had the NHS before the EU. We had equal pay before the EU. If anything, EU free movement has put British workers’ rights in more jeopardy by cheapening labour costs and increasing agency work and zero-hour contracts.
Big countries and big markets count, but less so than good governments and the good markets they can create in the long run. There is no evidence that the EU has been good for British markets, and the upcoming TTIP treaty is so bad that EU commissioners are negotiating it in secret.
As for the Remain campaign’s argument that the EU has led to 70 years of peace in Europe, this is not so much a punch as a wild swing. The desire for peace promoted the EU, not the other way around. The architecture of post-war security—Bretton Woods (1944), United Nations (1945), Marshall Aid (1948), NATO (1949)—was in place before the Coal and Steel Community (1951) and long before the Treaty of Rome (1957). Whatever the brave men who landed on the Normandy beaches thought they were doing, they weren't doing it for the EU.
It is NATO and the balance of power that secured peace in Europe, not trade deals. In any case, trade deals aren’t always benign; EU promptings in the Ukraine encouraged a toxic little war that brought back talk of nuclear conflict in Europe for the first time in 30 years. And Schengen has collapsed for security reasons, leaving member states exposed on all sides. If Turkey is granted visa-free travel, the odds of staying safe will worsen. If the Foreign Office idea of a liberal international order finally trumps our national security and Turkey is allowed to join the EU, why not Egypt? Why not Israel? Why not any other Mediterranean country that the White House deems useful?
The Remain campaign also has a bewildering set of defensive postures known as “uncertainty.” These are not so much hits as holds, ways of dragging your opponent down by pointing to the risks of moving. There’s no sure way to answer this. The UK is currently a member of 91 international bodies ranging from the Asian Development Bank to the Zangger Committee and no one has a clue whether they promote more uncertainty or less.
There have been many other reports that you would expect to promote certainty but which have not been convincing in the slightest. The government’s 2014 audit of EU “Balance of Competences,” with 2,300 pieces of written evidence on why the EU needs “ambitious reform,” has played no part in the campaign. Nor has the Cabinet Office document on how long it would take to unravel the treaties, which has been ignored from the beginning. Cameron’s four painstakingly-won concessions have been quickly forgotten.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England has issued warnings on market panic (central banks are supposed to create stability). And the Treasury Report on the effects of Brexit on GDP—come on, can you imagine Osborne allowing his civil servants to say anything else? There have been Whitehall farce threats that everything will fall down once we stand up: jobs, incomes, pensions, house prices, share prices, hospital places, value of the pound, trousers—they’re all coming down, while taxes and roaming charges will go up, we’re told.
Uncertainty is the very point of neo-liberal economics. In a market economy, they say, no one can be sure of the long run and risk makes people perform better. One point, however, is clear. No independent forecaster is predicting an economic disaster on Brexit. The worst-case scenario (drops of up to 8 per cent of GDP over a period of years) is highly speculative, not catastrophic and in any case, we can’t be free of uncertainty. Nations, like individuals, must incur some risk. The question is: how much?
Here, the left can put in some telling blows. The harder the EU drives integration, the less democratic it becomes and the less democratic it becomes, the harder it must drive integration. The technicians of the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice and the European Commission all shield the EU from its citizens.
The last thing the ECB wants is the elected government of Greece getting in the way of what happens in Greece. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recalled that in his negotiations with the ECB, Greece was subjected to humiliation, authoritarianism, brute force, inertia and “demonization of the weak”—and so lost its politics, economy, assets, borders and sovereignty. It’s true that Varoufakis remains an EU supporter, but he has always had a Marxist taste for tortured dialectics. He once supported Margaret Thatcher as the fast track to socialism.
The EU is in a hole and Brussels won’t stop digging. Within two or three years, the EU will either revert to a collection of sovereign states with common interests, or it will plunge into federal union with one government, one economy, and one debt. And because democracy cannot unite Europe (there is no “European people” to ask) complete unification can only be left to the commissioners and the technicians, an awful, undemocratic and deeply uncertain scenario.
It’s not as if we haven’t been warned. In a 2004 New Statesman article, Robert Skidelsky argued that 20th-century democracy had led to 20th-century genocide. Far better, he reasoned, to have undemocratic cosmopolitan empires than democratic self-determining nation-states. He thought that the EU was heading in the right direction.
There was no national debate between the British government first seeking membership in 1962 and getting it in 1973. Pro-EU MPs from all parties colluded in getting the legislation through without the question of national self-determination being brought to the country. Tony Benn called it a coup d’etat. In the 1975 referendum, the same assortment of mainstream politicians, banks, big businesses, foreign governments, NGOs, broadsheets, establishment luvvies and the like supported the Remain campaign.
They won that time because they didn’t tell (or grasp) the truth about sovereignty—a truth made clear at Maastricht in 1992 when a European Community became a Union. Soon after, those same groups wanted Britain to join the Euro or the heavens would fall. They didn't fall and we were kept out of it by the political intransigence of Gordon Brown at No 11 and the intellectual intransigence of Derek Scott, Blair's economics advisor, at No 10.
But don’t forget that for the whole of its membership, the UK has only been able to win vital concessions by threatening to leave. If the Remain camp wins on 23rd June, we must face up to the fact the UK cannot cry wolf again. We will be obliged to follow the rest wherever they take us.
So now is the time. So far and with honourable exceptions like Gisela Stuart, Labour’s official “Remain” position has been almost unforgiveable. Faced with a pro-EU parliamentary party, it might be that Corbyn had no alternative. It might be that in his heart he hopes for a “Leave” because he knows an integrated industrial strategy is not permissible without it.
Even so, is it not incredible that Labour policy groups have to be reminded by their advisors that the British people value their country (known in the jargon as “the politics of attachment”)? Is it not incredible that Labour can relegate social democratic agency in favour of markets? Is it not incredible that Labour front benchers have not been honest on war or on immigration? Is it not incredible that many Labour MPs still do not see that immigration is not about the identity of others so much as the British people’s identity of themselves as a self-determining, free people who have been misled and patronised by their elites? Finally, is it not incredible that a Labour Prime Minister cannot say “British jobs for British workers” because—and much as the party would prefer to forget the man who said it—if it cannot say that, what can it say?
It’s true that the Leave campaign includes Tories on stilts. But so does the other side. And it’s an evil right-wing governments who gave us this chance to vote and debate. Hopefully, a Labour government in a British nation-state will have the nerve to do its stuff too—no more treaties or passing the buck—and we will have our politics back.
This is a crisis of succession of the sort that shapes our history. If we vote for Brussels or Strasbourg as our next political class, we are voting for oblivion if it all goes well, and chaos if it doesn’t. The left’s best shot is its core belief in social democracy as the shortest possible distance between the people and their representatives. If we vote for free movement of labour and capital across 28 nation-states we are voting for the dissolution of the pronoun “we”—the word on which the left’s hopes depend. Nothing in the Remain campaign touches this as a reason for being left and staying British. Time for the left to get up, stand up, and come to the mark.
